Saturday, November 25, 2006

I began to tire of seeing page after page of text, so I broke the monotony by adding a site logo. It serves no other purpose, but who knows? Maybe one day I'll be hawking coffee mugs and T-shirts emblazoned with this graphic!

I went through several ideas before selecting a shape, during which I gained respect for professional logo designers. Some famous logos seem so simple that I feel I could have designed them. But on further examination, they insiduously invade and reside in one's memory, are pleasing to the eye (or at least are not eyesores), and in fact satisfy many constraints.

After a few attempts I discovered that it is extremely diffcult to find symbols with the necessary properties, and in my case, to even judge how effective a given image is. Thus I settled on a design as soon as I sketched one that I could tolerate.

I recall the path I took. At one point I was experimenting with a stylized "P(B,C)". I removed the letters to get "(,)" and played around with the parentheses and comma until I arrived at the current logo.

As for the colour scheme, to pay homage to my current university, I let Stanford's design guidelines on colour dictate my choices. Thus the logo is predominantly cardinal, with sandstone and black playing secondary roles. On most desktops, many screen elements are white and hence all four Stanford "Identity Colors" appear.

The result reminds me of a symbol featured in the movie "The Incredibles". I hope this causes people to think the PBC library is incredible, at least subconsciously!

I used Inkscape to realize my idea. I had never tried Inkscape before. I was surprised at how easy it was for a newbie to use and how quickly I became comfortable and efficient with its interface.

(Strictly speaking, this is false. Many moons ago I fired up Inkscape's ancestor Sodipodi, but I was unable to do much without reading documentation. Either Sodipodi has since made great advances, or the fork was worth the trouble.)

While I'm on my soapbox lauding software, let me also praise Valgrind. I first heard of this program years ago. If only I had tried it years ago.

Finding memory leaks in my C projects had always been troublesome. Thanks to geek machismo [isn't this an oxymoron?], I chose the hard way, namely, to code wrappers around standard memory allocation functions that recorded statistics which I would then analyze to detect leaks.

Since my leak detection code would need to be bug-free itself for this to work, I would restrict myself to primitive designs to simplify implementation details, ultimately leaving much of the sleuthing to the developer. Furthermore, toggling leak detection was so annoying I rarely checked for leaks.

As I recently discovered, Valgrind magically gives detailed reports on where the leak is and what is being leaked [insert HP joke here]. And to use Valgrind one only needs to invoke gcc with different options during compilation.